The D34010WYH1 NUC gives me the option of storing virtual machines on a 2.5 inch HDD or SSD inside the NUC (and the 1TB WD Red drive gives me a good amount of local storage to play around with). The RAM is low voltage (1.35v) which is required. The 32 Gb USB 3 flash drive is over-kill (only 4GB is required for vSphere 5.5) but it is very small (and pretty fast too). I needed the HDMI adapter to connect the NUC to my HDTV during vSphere installation.

The installation process is quite straight-forward and you will need the following:

Great article!,I managed to install my ESXi but it took me a while to figure out couple of things to make it work that were not mentioned here.

1) Make sure the USB is formatted in FAT32 not NTFS

2) I had a mSATA drive and after the install it would not go into the ESXi OS, so followed this forum advice for finding the mbr and then it worked fine.
SHIFT +O and type ‘formatwithmbr’https://communities.vmware.com/thread/328968

I purchased the i5 NUC D54250WYKH and your instructions worked just great. Excellent box thus far, have a bunch of VMs running on it with no problems.

Notes for others – the light on the USB disk is very bright, and there is a slight sound of the laptop drive spinning. The fan is on (I can feel the air blowing) but I can’t hear it.

I also purchased and installed the Intel 7260.HMWG wifi/bluetooth card, but have not tried them yet under ESXi. They seem to need drivers too, but I haven’t bothered to do the research to get them working under ESXi.

Hi Vince, glad to hear you got your vSphere NUC up and running 🙂 I love my NUC – it replaced a mid sized tower 🙂 Thanks for the additional info – I hope that everything works out with the wifi/bluetooth …

I’ve had a couple situations where the system goes stupid on me, with df showing the /vmfs/volumes/vm with values of zero for everything ala:
Filesystem Bytes Used Available Use% Mounted on
VMFS-5 0 0 0 0% /vmfs/volumes/vm

The Windows client shows the running VMs there, but they’re not too healthy, if they’re up at all. Any not-running VMs are not selectable. I stop the running VMs and put the NUC into maintenance mode, then reboot it, and everything works ok again. At that point I just need to tak ESXi out of maintenance mode and restart the VMs.

Based on your article, I tried installing ESXi 5.0 on a Macbook Air (Haswell) and after booting up and at the end of the the yellow black installer screen it gives me the error No Network adapters found.My Mac does not have ethernet port and has only wi-fi. But I thought the whole idea of repackaging the ISO with the 2 vib files should have helped detect a network adapter(ethernet or wireless).Can you please advice on this.If wireless is not supported,can I make a virtual network adapter,thunderbolt ethernet VIB or something similar? Please advice

The Intel Driver (net-e1000e-2.3.2.x86_64.vib) is a gigabit ethernet driver – so it will not work for WiFi. I would be surprised if Wireless was supported. Looking on google / bing I see there are plenty of people trying to get vSphere working on Mac Book Pros so you might luck out there.

Update to my Oct-3 post on seeing a couple crashes – I think it was ‘likely’ heat related. I have the NUC in a computer hutch that can get a little warm where the NUC is if I have the doors closed. No crashes running it for 6 weeks with the doors open. Guess I need to reorganize the hardware in there a little.

I posted to the VMware community forums and got nowhere. One guy saying look at the log for errors (did that already – yes there were sata errors, question was ‘why’) and another saying to contact my vendor (of course this is impossible, Intel does not support ESXi on the NUC).

Still running great – Win8.1Pro screams with 4GB ram over RDP to the Macbook Air. Also running a few Linux VMs all the time, NUC isn’t even breathing hard. Only downside I have thus far is that the Supra USB key’s led is retina-burning-bright, and there is some fan or spinning disk noise from the NUC. I think it’s the spinning disk mostly. Sound gets out through the fan vents on the side and mainly the back.

Very pleased with the NUC, so thanks again for the great post.

It would be great if you had a post about how (whether) to upgrade ESXi once we get it to the 5.5 level this page documents nicely. Deciphering the maze of VMware docs and ever changing product names is just impossible.

I recently purchased a NUC D54250WYKH i5 and I am constantly getting install video errors it seems. A screen that changes everytime i try a different install that is almost unreadable. I’ve followed your directions to the T and it still hangs at the blue/ yellow screen….this time it says ahci loaded successfully i can read…. But i have seen it stop and hang at a different driver i know…Very odd problem. Anyone have this problem and know how to fix it?

Wondering if it could be that you appear to be using a 3D monitor? One of the sources that I used for this post was an install on a D54250WYKH – so it should work fine. Do you have a different monitor to try?

USB
* no moving parts
* very few reads / writes to drive: usb should last a long time
* cheaper than a hard drive
* easy to have a back usb drive ready to go
* all internal drives are available for datastores

That’s a many-year old thread. What’s the current scoop ? Does ESXi run all in ramdisk when it boots off USB ? Are the logs written to USB so ‘eventually’ there might be an issue ? What’s a good ‘current’ way to have a backup copy of the USB disk just in case ?

The thread might be ‘old’ but it still applies. You can install vSphere on two jump drives and keep one as a spare. Or install on one drive a find some software to produce an exact copy of the original.

There are other options available such as booting from SAN but for home use a jump drive is fine 🙂